How today's media would cover D-Day

Commentary: Plus, why Lions Gate wanted Moore's film

By

JonFriedman

NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- On the eve of the 60th anniversary of D-Day, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, a self-professed "history buff," has this dream about the troops landing on Normandy.

"I would have loved to cover it -- and I hope I would have been courageous enough," said Blitzer, 56. "I wish I could have had access to General Eisenhower, leading up to the invasion. I look back and think that would have been fascinating."

And what would Blitzer have asked Ike?

"I would've asked him, 'Going in, you're expecting a 70 percent casualty rate? You could be right. You could be wrong. They could be sitting ducks.'"

Indeed, how strikingly different the heroic and stunning images of the 150,000 men attacking the enemy would have seemed if innovations that we so often take for granted in the 21st century -- such as 24-hour cable news channels, the Internet, digital photography and high-speed electronic communications -- had existed on June 6, 1944.

"We'd be seeing things so vividly, and as we did during the Iraq war, getting such crisp images," mused Stephen Koepp, deputy managing editor of Time magazine
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In Time's May 21 issue, Nancy Gibbs wrote an absorbing cover story on D-Day ("Why It Matters 60 Years Later").

The collective press representatives would have likely had an impact on the event itself.

"The Germans would know we were coming because it would be on CNN," Lamar Graham, the general manager of Parade magazine and a former professor of journalism history at New York University, noted wryly.

Thanks to technological advances, visual images from war today frequently come into our living rooms in pristine form. But those cherished memories of grainy photos and film images count for a lot.

"The way we understand D-Day evolved over a long time," Time's Koepp said. "We would have appreciated immediately the massive scale of the invasion."

Such movies as Steven Spielberg's graphic and gritty "Saving Private Ryan" have reinforced the romance of the invasion that has built up in America's consciousness.

"Maybe there is a false sense -- because things happen so fast -- that we understand the scale of events," Koepp mused. "What happened that day was the simultaneous experiences of hundreds of thousands of fighting people."

Would D-Day have fit into our often grotesque notions of pop culture?

"I'm sure most correspondents would do valiant, terrific work -- only to have to fight for airtime with the armies covering the Scott Peterson trial," quipped Joan Walsh, the astute managing editor of Salon.com.

"Even with hundreds, maybe thousands of reporters, camera people, network anchors, bloggers, talk-show pundits focused on the invasion, photos of the coffins of the 2,500 Allied soldiers killed on D-Day would be strangely impossible to acquire," Walsh said.

"So much happened in comparative secrecy," Walsh said, "I can't even imagine how the media would attempt to show that kind of carnage."

The brutality of the war would have been toned down to fit the public's tastes.

"We wouldn't have seen the brutality on American television," Blitzer of CNN says. "In World War II, you never saw a dead soldier's body."

One thing is certain: Journalists wish they could have covered a story as big as D-Day.

"I've been fascinated by how leaders make those decisions -- and these were decisions that saved the world," Blitzer said. "I would have liked to go in on the drive from beaches of Normandy to the liberation of Paris and continuing on to Berlin. Just to have been an eyewitness would have been exhilarating."

Lions Gate goes for the big time

Lions Gate Entertainment, which has built a reputation in Hollywood by making such adventurous and sexy films as "Secretary" and "Monster's Ball," is releasing a very different kind of movie on June 25: Michael Moore's much publicized, anti-Bush documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11."

Moore won an Oscar for his documentary "Bowling for Columbine" and endeared himself to liberals by blasting President Bush during his acceptance speech.

Lions Gate had a chance to get into the game because Walt Disney
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wouldn't allow its Miramax unit to distribute the movie. Disney publicly said the overtly political content was objectionable. As a result, Miramax leaders Harvey and Bob Weinstein had to find an outside distributor.

"It's great to be considered a world-class distributor by a guy who obviously knows the business well," said Lions Gate vice chairman Michael Burns, referring to Harvey Weinstein.

"We're financial mercenaries disguised as capitalists," Burns said.

Burns said he was eager to release the controversial movie. "It's about freedom of speech and doing anything we can do to help combat apathy," he said.

It's also, of course, about money. Lions Gate
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is hoping that the media frenzy surrounding the movie will help generate a $20 million opening-weekend box office.

Noting that his studio has also released such provocative fare as "Dogma," which angered some Catholics, Burns joked: "I suppose we're equal-opportunity offenders."

Turning serious, Burns said that the Moore movie will enable Lions Gate to "go on with the building of a brand and solidifying our name in the industry as a go-to distributor of choice for provocative, intelligent content."

Sports Illustrated's `Reverse Curse'

One of the infamous features of the magazine industry is the so-called Sports Illustrated "Jinx." It goes like this: When a great player or a hot team appears on the SI cover, bad things tend to follow.

But that darned Derek Jeter!

With SI's cover language proclaiming "THE SLUMP," the star New York Yankee shortstop was showcased in the issue that closed Tuesday and hit newsstands on Thursday.

At a quick glance, Jeter looked like the perfect choice for Tom Verducci's smart piece about every athlete's secret fear: going into a slump. After all, Jeter, a career .317 hitter, had gone into a mysterious, sub-.200 downturn this season, marked by his 0-for-32 hitless streak. In New York, the news rivaled talk of Iraq and the city's 2012 Olympic bid. It even reached page one of the New York Times.

But on the day that the magazine's issue closed, Jeter slammed two home runs and two singles. He hit another homer the next night and had amassed 27 runs batted in, only two fewer than new Yankee superstar Alex Rodriguez, whose picture on Sports Illustrated from earlier this season decorates the cover of Time Warner's Profile 2004.

True, SI, a Time Warner publication, covered its backside by including on the cover (albeit in small type) that Jeter had rallied in the previous week).

Still, is this a sign that the dreaded SI jinx is losing its bite?

One Yankee fan saw Jeter's picture on the SI cover on the subway after the game at Yankee Stadium Wednesday night and said: "SI should call it `The Reverse Curse!' "

MEDIA WEB QUESTION: HOW DO YOU THINK THE MEDIA WOULD HAVE DONE IN COVERING D-DAY?

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